


i am still running

by nadin



Category: Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: Barry Saves The Day, Christmas Fluff, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Present day setting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 07:21:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17239910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nadin/pseuds/nadin
Summary: She is so beautiful, and because Steve doesn’t know what else to say, he says just that.Diana smiles. Her hand curls over his jaw. “I missed you,” she says softly.When Barry Allen runs a hundred years into the past to save Diana's long-lost pilot, he doesn't know that he is giving her the greatest gift of all.





	i am still running

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so this is a Secret Santa exchange gift for [blueincandescence](https://blueincandescence.tumblr.com/)
> 
> I was meant to keep it short and sweet and then it got out of control, and I regret nothing! I do hope you'll enjoy it :)
> 
> The titles is from Jon Foreman's song because the line _Build me a home / Inside your open arms /The only place I ever will belong_ is something I think SCREAMS Steve and Diana.

_1918_

“Steve.”

Diana’s voice breaks through the deafening bellow of massive propellers and the roar of blood in his ears, muffled by the wind and the distance between them.

He wavers, for just a moment. Wants to look at her one last time. His throat closes up, his heart so heavy in his chest he doesn’t know how it doesn’t weigh him down to the cold concrete of the airfield that vibrates slightly beneath his feet.

Steve clenches his teeth and surges forward. To look back is to change his mind – he knows it, like he knows that it is not a luxury they can afford. There is no time. If she is who she has been claiming to be all along, if she really can stop this terror then he knows she will, but she can’t be everywhere at once. One of them needs to take care of the deadly gas.

_It has to be me._

He has come to this war to make a difference, and he hates that having to choose between Diana and millions of people is the price he must pay for it.

He knows she will understand, though. Knows that she would have done the same thing.

It is the path they have both chosen.

One last burst of effort, and he is climbing into the airplane, fighting his way toward the cockpit. It is easy to move when he has a goal, a clear plan. He tries not to think of Diana, of her disoriented confusion. Tries not to think of the way she looked at him last night, of what her lips tasted like—

Steve sinks into the pilot’s seat, his hands moving on the will of their own as they steer the plane forward, his muscle memory, strong and steady, no match for his scattered mind. For a moment, he can swear he hears her calling his name again, but he brushes the thought off - she is too far away. Must be the wind.

The altitude is making him dizzy, blurring his vision.

The inside of the plane smells of gasoline and metal.

Steve leans back in his seat. He closes his eyes and takes a breath.

He doesn’t think of breaking more promises or wish that things were different for them, but his finger trembles on the trigger nonetheless.

When the fire starts licking at his skin, he thinks of dancing in the snow.

\---

_2018_

The air is fresh.

It is the first thing that Steve notices when his mind swims back to consciousness. It has been so long since he breathed anything but death and blood and gunpowder smoke that despite the fog in his head and dull throbbing in his skull, it is the smell of cold soil and old autumnal grass near his face that snaps him into wakefulness. Even more so than a rock jutting into his shoulder blade.

The other thing is the voice.

“—come on, man. Wake up.” It fades in and out a little, muffled, “God, she’s gonna kill me,” followed by an urgent whisper: “Hey, come on. Steve? Are you Steve?”

There is a tapping on his cheek. And then the other one.

Steve’s chest constricts when he inhales sharply, his lungs expanding as if he’d come up from underwater. He blinks his eyes open, squinting against the brightness of the day even though the sky above him is low and grey.

He is on his back, lying on the cold ground. There is a line of trees to the right from him, blurred in the periphery of his vision; the chilly breeze smells intoxicatingly of snow.

“There you are!” The chipper voice makes him wince a little. “I was starting to get worried--”

He blinks once more, and a face hovering above him shifts into focus. _Half_ a face. Steve’s brows pull together in confusion. There is a man sitting beside him and trying to rouse him - and quite unceremoniously, too. The upper half of his face is hidden under a red mask with some yellow insignia on either side of his head. When Steve looks at him, he breaks into a smile so bright that it is tempting to smile back.

If only he knew what the actual hell was happening to him.

“Look,” the man tones down his enthusiasm. His eyes dart around for a moment or two before he leans closer to Steve, his voice dropping again. “I kinda miscalculated the return point a little bit, but don’t tell Clark. I’ll never live it down.” He makes a face. “Hang in for a little while longer, okay?”

None of this makes any sense. Steve’s eyes drop from the man’s fast-moving lips to his shoulders and then down to his torso, all wrapped in a red suit, tight as a second skin. He tries to think but his brain feels like it is made of jelly, his stomach tied into a queasy knot.

_The black sky above Belgium… the plane… Diana._

A headache explodes behind his eyes.

This must be a dream.

“What--” he starts, his mouth dry and his voice croaky. He swallows and wants to try again, but when darkness closes over him once more, he is grateful.

\---

There are ten feet and a hundred years between them.

Diana stares at him from across the room in the glass house where the smiley guy who introduced himself as Barry has brought Steve a little while ago. Her face is ashen like she is seeing a ghost, and when she looks at him like that he is not sure he is not one. Even from his spot fifteen feet away from her, he hears her shuddered inhale. His heart drops into his stomach.

The year is 2018, according to Barry and an older man with thin-rimmed glasses sitting on the tip of his nose who opened the door for them when they arrived. A hundred years from the day when he climbed into a German airplane to help Diana stop the God of War from plunging the world into endless chaos. A hundred years that were crumpled and compressed into the few minutes that it took Barry to drag him all the way into the future – Steve chooses not to think of this just yet.

He doesn’t believe that what Barry has told him is true, and Diana doesn’t either, if the look of shock on her face is any indication.

Her eyes roam over his features for several long moments. Someone is talking. There are other people in the room – Barry, the butler whose name Steve missed the first time around, and two other men. If he wasn’t so busy trying to stop his heart from breaking through his ribcage and leaping out of his chest, Steve would probably find it fascinating that the face of one of them if half-covered with a metal plate.

She doesn’t believe that he is real, and he can’t fault her for it. He wants to move toward her, but he is not sure how. Not sure if he can because it has been so long and you can’t walk across time. Yet, he remembers the way she felt in his arms _only last night_ , when the fire went out in the grate without either of them noticing for they didn’t need it. Not when they had one another to keep warm.

The memory is so bright it all but makes him keel over, blood roaring in his ears.

A hundred years…

He stares back.

Diana looks the same but also so strikingly different that Steve is not sure whether to be excited or perplexed, and it is not her hair, slicked back, or her black pants and a fitted long-sleeved shirt – she is dressed like a man but he decides not to dwell on that, or how curious Etta would have been. It is in her eyes, guarded and full of doubt. The Diana he had met on the Paradise Island was starry-eyed and hopeful beyond anything he had ever seen. The woman standing before him now is anything but.

He doesn’t want to know what she has gone through to have the spark that shone brighter than the sun itself grow dim. Not yet.

“Steve,” Diana breathes, and even though her voice is so soft that it barely carries across the space between them, it still feels like a sucker punch that nearly sends him down to his knees.

Steve swallows, hard, and tries to smile. “Hey.”

Someone is speaking. Barry, Steve thinks, but he is not sure. Someone is trying to explain all of this to her. He doesn’t think she is listening; knows he certainly is not. Doesn’t care much for what is being said, either.

All he wants is to look at her, take her in the way he never had a chance to. Before, they were always running out of time.

“Can’t be…” she whispers, shaking her head.

He finds his voice and says, “It’s me.”

A strangled sob rises in her throat. Her hand flies up to her mouth and he watches her face crumple.

“Diana…”

When she slams into him with the full force of an Amazon warrior, he staggers backwards, nearly taking them both down to the floor. Doesn’t care that she has knocked all wind out of him, too relieved, too… everything. He catches her in his arms and gathers her to him, only now realizing that he is shaking all over.

The past hour of his life might have felt like a dream, but this is real. Diana is real. She is warm and solid and so very _here_. Steve buries his face in the curve of her neck and breathes her in, and god help him, she smells wonderful. Like sunshine and home, and it makes something snap loose inside of him. All the time he has spent holding back – he can’t take it anymore.

“Steve,” she breathes. He feels her lips brush along his jaw ever so briefly. She is saying something, asking something but her voice drowns in a thunderous sound of his heartbeat.

For him, it has only been a few hours, and he still can’t imagine missing her more.

Her hands move over his face, lean fingers skittering over his cheeks, pushing his hair back from his forehead. He can see tears in her eyes, her smile is weak and watery, and the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.

“You’re back,” Diana murmurs, cupping his face in her hands, dark eyes flicking between the blue ones as though she is still waiting for him to disappear like a dream. “I don’t—I don’t understand. I watched you--”

She cuts off, a shadow of anguish crossing her face.

When Steve leans in and kisses her, desperate to wipe the last memory she has of him from her mind, he can feel salt on her mouth – hers or his, he has no idea. She kisses him back, deeply and hungrily, a century of longing poured into one touch, enough to leave him dazed and disoriented and breathless. And so alive he can feel it thrumming in his blood. Diana’s hands push through his hair, her arms wind around his neck and he holds her closer, scared beyond words to lose her again.

She feels the same, tastes the same, and after everything, it is almost too much to bear.

Steve makes a mental note to thank the cheerful Barry later, but the thought is fleeting. The room falls away. He doesn’t care for anyone standing there. He is lost in her and he doesn’t want to be found.

\---

Everything around them is a blur.

Steve doesn’t remember when everyone leaves, or how, but one moment he and Diana are standing in the centre of what appears to be a living room, the weak autumnal sun inching its way towards the horizon outside, and then it is dark and they are sitting on the floor with their backs against the glass wall overlooking the deck and a lake beyond it. The reading lamp on the side table by the couch is switched on, filling the room with warm light, and while Steve knows that they are not alone in the house, he can’t hear anyone else.

His arm is around Diana and her hand idly traces the collar of his shirt. She can’t seem to stop touching him and Steve doesn’t mind. He hasn’t looked away from her once.

His thick coat and the jacket of his stolen German uniform are draped over the back of one of the chairs, a silent reminder of the collision of time. He is yet to understand how they are going to go about all of this because her brows furrow whenever her gaze drifts to his clothes and it is clear that she is no more fond of those memories than he is. He doesn’t want her to remember.

Steve slides a knuckle under her chin, lifting her face to his, and kisses her again, softly.

“I can’t believe this,” Diana murmurs against his lips.

“Yeah, well….” He lets out a short laugh and shakes his head. “Is it really 2018? I can’t exactly… it’s a hard one to process.”

She smiles, her eyes crinkling at the corners, and his heart slams hard against his ribs. God, he loves her smile. She raises her hand to stroke her thumb along his jaw and nods. “It is.”

He nods, too. “I--” he clears his throat. “I—I’m sorry,” he mutters.

She frowns. “Steve…”

“That night,” he continues quickly, his eyes moving over her face. The same face. It’s been so long… how is it possible? He swallows. “I wasn’t planning to—I didn’t want to—it happened so fast.” He is stuttering and babbling but he doesn’t know how to stop. She is watching him quietly, and he tries to remember what it was that he wanted to tell her but never had a chance to. “I’m sorry for leaving you, Diana. I’m sorry that you had to do this on your own for long. I’m so sorry for—for everything.”

She touches his cheek. “Steve.”

When he looks up, her eyes are kind. He leans closer to her and rests their heads together.

“You’re here now,” she tells him, and he feels the weight of guilt lift off his chest. Just barely, but it’s a start. “There is nothing to forgive.” If it wasn’t for his arm wrapped around her, he is certain he would have flown away.

“I still don’t understand,” he admits, glancing around the room before he turns to her again.

“I will explain, I promise.” Diana runs her fingertips down his cheek and Steve covers her hand with his, turning into her touch to kiss her palm. “I will tell you everything you want to know.”

He nods once more.

He has questions, so many of them, but they all fade in comparison to the enormity to what has happened to him, to _them_. A chance he has never dared to hope for. Everything he has ever wanted right there, his for the taking. They have known each for one week - and a hundred years - and his heart feels so full that he can hardly breathe.

“Diana,” he starts, unsure where he was going with it. His thoughts are a jumbled mess, and she is watching him, her gaze full of wonder, making him forget how to think.

She is so beautiful, and because he doesn’t know what else to say, he says just that.

She smiles. Her hand curls over his jaw. “I missed you,” she says softly.

Steve feels the corners of his mouth tug upwards. “I missed you, too,” he confesses, which sounds odd and silly – _he is not the one who has spent a century without her_ – and it makes her laugh a little.

He reaches behind her to pull the elastic band off of her hair and it cascades down her shoulders. She doesn’t stop him as he threads his fingers through the heavy mass, soft and smooth against his skin.

She presses a kiss to the side of his chin and rests her forehead against his again. “You look good for a 136-year old,” she tells him.

Steve laughs. “And how old are you, again?” He teases. They are quiet for a few moments, content in the comfort of each other’s presence.

After a while, he takes a breath, bracing himself for whatever comes next. “So, where do we go from here?” He asks, yearning for her answer and scared of it all at once. He would have done anything for her, anything to be with her, but a hundred years is a long time, and he doesn’t want to presume, not even after—

A void opens up between them. A hundred years feel like forever.

“What do you want to do, Steve?” Diana asks. 

He watches her watch him as he searches for words.

He is a man who infiltrated Ludendorff’s circle, a man who walked – well, _rode_ – into the German High Command like it was nothing, a man who climbed into a plane packed to the brim with poisonous gas and flew toward his death. He has done all that, and yet he has never been more terrified than he is right now. No one has ever told him that baring his heart and soul before someone he loves could feel so paralyzing.

Diana is still waiting, the pause stretching between them.

Steve twists a strand of her hair around his finger. He swallows. “I want—I want to do everything we didn’t get to do… the first time around,” he says, hoping against all hope that those are the right words. “To pick up where we’ve left off.”

“I would like that,” she whispers. “I would like that very much.”

She stands up and offers him her hand, “Come with me.”

Steve grabs onto it like it’s a lifeline and he is a drowning man and she is his salvation. Always has been.

He follows her through the quiet house and down the hallway to the last door on the left. She pushes it open and steps into the dark room, pulling him inside after her. She closes the door and turns around. Her hands reach for him, smoothing over the planes of his chest like she still can’t quite accept that he is standing right there, made of flesh and blood.

Steve lets her, watching her brows furrow ever so slightly, barely resisting the urge to smooth that frown out with his thumb.

“Diana...”

She takes a shaky breath and looks up to meet his eyes.

“You must be tired,” she whispers as she lifts her hand to touch his hair near his temple.

“Not that tired,” he says, his mouth suddenly dry because he doesn’t quite believe that he is real either, or that she is, or anyone else in the house, in this time. It felt so much more different with the smiling Barry and the rest of them around. Here, alone with her, the air feels charged and thick, filled with unsaid words and promises he never got to keep.

Her fingers curl over fistfuls of his shirt and she pulls him to her. When she kisses him, there is a different kind of hunger, different kind of longing to her touch than before. The one that coils his belly into a tight knot and sets his blood on fire. It demands and claims and consumes, and Steve is happy to oblige and surrender. He is breathing her like she is the air, the light, the _everything_.

“Are you sure?” He rasps when he comes up for air, his head swimming and her eyes the one thing he can see.

Diana doesn’t hesitate. “I am.”

Later, he sleeps at last, his arms wrapped tightly around her body, their legs tangled together, his mind at peace. And for once, for the first time since the war consumed them, he doesn’t dream.

\---

The world is a mess.

So much more of a mess than Steve could ever have imagined. It leaves his mind reeling.

He has always prided himself on being adaptable, on coping well with changes, but that was before the reality of the future slammed into him like a freight train. There is no keeping up with it now, no taking his new life in stride. There is only holding on with all his might and praying that he is not thrown off at the next curve.

And boy, oh boy, are there many of those.

Diana tells him the truth. About herself and Ares and the secrets that her mother kept close to her heart for longer than mankind remembered itself. There is an edge to her voice when she speaks Hippolyta’s name and it catches in her throat, and Steve knows that the wound is still open and bleeding. That it might take another century for it to heal.

She tells him about the Justice League, too, and while he is fascinated, by the time she is done talking he has realized that he is not surprised it’s where he path took her. It’s in her blood. He can’t imagine her standing aside and watching the world burn. It’s a bittersweet feeling, too – pride mixed with understanding that she has had a whole life that he wasn’t and never will be a part of.

Steve thinks of her first day in his world, on the streets of London, curious and determined and taken aback by just about everything around her. Now she belongs here more than he does, and he has yet to wrap his mind around that.

The regret quells when he sees the fond look on her face, hears affection in her voice when she speaks of the other members of her team. In the few days that he has known them, he has grown to understand the sentiment, and if nothing else, he is happy that she has found her place.

“So, you guys are saving the world, huh?” He muses with a smile when she falls silent.

Diana shakes her head. “We are doing our best to keep peace,” she corrects, suddenly wistful. “The world can’t be saved, Steve. Not when it is set on the path of destruction, not from itself. But we can protect it— _try_ to protect it when nobody else will.”

He doesn’t know how to respond to that. His instinct is to reassure her but even in his mind, the words sound empty. He knows better than to feed them to her.  

One day, Steve thinks, he will ask her to tell him about the darkness she has seen and walked through, but the scars are too raw yet. He can see it in her eyes, hear it in her voice; she carries it inside of her like he does his own. Too raw and too tender to the touch, and it is not the pain that he wants to bring back.

They have time, he reminds himself, and lets the subject rest for now.

\---

The world is a mess, and Steve has never felt more like a fish out of water before.

He is a little amused and a little insulted when Barry asks him if he knows what a refrigerator is. After all, 1918 wasn’t that long ago. But then Diana has to go back to Paris and he follows – there is no question about whether or not he would. He would have followed her to the edge of the world if she so wished, eagerly and gladly.

The feeling is thrilling and exhilarating and terrifying all at once.

In Steve’s memories, Paris is the city filled with pain and people trying to escape the horrors of the war. The city of hospitals for the injured and a refuge for people running away from the terrors of the front. He remembers grey streets and grey faces, the whole place a smudge in his mind like someone ran an eraser over a pencil drawing. It used to smell of dust and smoke and desperation, bleak image with bleak future.

Diana’s Paris is nothing like that. It is bright and colourful and loud. God, so loud. It sets off his inner alarms and makes him look over his shoulder more often than not. It is packed with locals and tourists, cars honking and cameras flashing. Even in the late November, with its endless rains and cutting winds, it is bursting with life.

Steve tries to match those two Parises together in his head and fails, relieved that hers is nothing like what he feared it might be and scared that it is yet another piece of the puzzle that doesn’t quite fit, and might never do. Once again, he thinks of Diana stepping into his world for the first time, his life alien and wild to her. And he wonders if she felt just as lost then as he does now, or if it is different for him because he is looking instinctively for something familiar but comes up empty each time?

Her home is an obstacle course that he needs to navigate with the care and precision of a trained soldier. His boot camp has nothing on Diana’s kitchen with its shiny appliances that confuse and terrify him more than an army of angry Germans. He doesn’t understand why a stovetop needs so many settings, and apparently there is absolutely nothing like a ‘smart’ phone to make a person feel irrevocably dumb.

Steve is not used to feeling so helpless, so hopeless. So out of control.

“You know that I don’t care about whether or not you can use the toaster, right?” Diana asks him one night.

“A waffle-maker,” Steve corrects, frustrated. He has figured out the toaster, thank you very much.

She presses her lips together and tries not to laugh, earning a glare from him in response.

“I almost set your kitchen on fire,” Steve grumbles under his breath.

“That’s what we have a fire extinguisher for,” she points out, amused.

He hums noncommittally and shakes his head, looking away.

A moment later, her arms slide around his waist and she presses close to him. She rests her chin on his shoulder and a shuddered breath stutters unevenly from his chest. He curls his hands around her forearms, thumbs brushing over her wrists.

“And it is _our_ kitchen,” Diana adds – something the she has said before but the sense of belonging hasn’t quite settled yet. Being adrift for so long, he wonders if it ever will. She presses a kiss to his shoulder, warm even through the fabric of his shirt. “Steve?”

“Hm?”

“What if it was me?”

He half-turns to her. “What?”

“After the war, if you—” she falters for a moment.

They never talk of the _before,_ dancing artfully around the subject of his demise that didn’t quite happen, but also did. Sure, they have spoken about Charlie and Etta and Sameer and Chief, trading the stories from his time with them and hers, but there is a wall around _that_ night, an unspoken agreement to never take it down. She is treading carefully along it now, balancing on the edge of it, and there is a tug in his stomach when she comes close to falling over.

“If it worked out differently and you lived, would it have mattered to you that I didn’t know a thing about your life?” She asks quietly.

He thinks of her on the boat, telling him that London looked _hideous_ , in Selfridge’s under Etta’s watchful eye, in the council – equally fascinated and shocked, and his lips twitch a little, the irony in the reversal of their roles not lost on him. He remembers his own amusement and exasperation, their race against time and his desire to slow it down.

“No, of course not,” Steve says decisively. He turns around in the circle of her arms, feeling his shoulders relax, tension draining out of tight knots of his muscles. Diana nuzzles into him, tucking her face into the curve of his neck, her breath warm on his skin, and he wraps his arms around her. “Never.”

“Then why should it matter to me?”

He huffs, unable to argue with his own reasoning.

Some spy, he muses. If he allowed himself to be cornered like that on a mission, he’d be dead within a day. But, as it turns out, that’s the effect Diana has on him. Instant and absolute surrender.

It’s not about that, though. It’s not the coffee machine or her laptop that make him pause in his tracks and do a double-take at his new life. Not the new clothes that fit right but still occasionally make him feel like he is wearing someone else’s persona. He can’t say it, _won’t_ say it, but there are still moments when he is acutely aware of the abyss between them. The one that’s always been there and might always remain.

He has yet to understand by the grace of what gods did he get someone like her to love someone like him.

She is a princess and a goddess with a heart of gold. She could have had anything, any _one_ , and this is not something Steve takes lightly; she could have this whole world at her feet. There is never a moment when he feels like he needs to prove something to her, that he needs to earn her love and affection, but part of him still wants to know that he is worthy, and there are times when it’s not that simple.

But she is right, too. If their situation was reversed, he wouldn’t have cared for a moment. He would have wanted to be with her and he would give himself to her without hesitation. His heart – a little worse for wear but still beating, his soul – a little tired and frail around the edges, his mind and body, and everything in between.

“I love you,” he whispers into her ear.

Never tires of saying it.

\---

Steve stops looking for reasoning.

Somebody told him once, a long time ago, that you don’t love someone because of their good qualities but despite their bad ones. Steve knows now that it is bullshit. He doesn’t love Diana because she is generous and kind and full of light, or because she makes his heart beat at a different pace. And he doesn’t love her in spite of her uncompromising stubbornness and impulsiveness.

He just does – because he can. Because he is lucky to have her.

He stops trying to justify it in his mind because it is not a rabbit’s hole he wants to jump into. And more importantly, he no longer feels like he needs to.

He is still learning and it’s infuriating at times. It is not just the technology and the settings on the washing machine that won’t ruin his new clothes. It is everything. The world is made of new rules – how to speak, how to act, how to be. It is a process of trial and error, and there are moments when he needs to remind himself to take a breath. The future is not going anywhere.

He likes Netflix and hates crossword puzzles because everything has changed and he doesn’t know any answers anymore. They invented a new world and gave birth to new people while he didn’t exist. How the hell is he supposed to know who the 39th President of the United States was? When did they get so many of them? Before he died, they were only on the 28th. He likes the cars and doesn’t quite appreciate Indian food that is too spicy for his palate. He does understand the concept of inflation but every trip to the supermarket feels like being robbed in broad daylight.

“We can afford some strawberries, Steve.” Diana picks the crate that he tries to shove back into the fridge and puts it into their cart.

She bites her lip around a smile, and he feels his face grow hot.  

Just looking at the price tags is making him mildly sick.

“You could eat for a week on that,” Steve mutters under his breath but doesn’t try to remove anything else from the cart. She will probably send him to wait for her in the car if he does, he suspects, and chooses not to mention that strawberries are not even in season.

Diana shakes her head, her expression sympathetic. “Not anymore, I’m afraid. Not for a while.”

He huffs through his nose.

She loops her arm through his while he ignores an older lady with a young girl giving them curious looks.

Half the time, he can’t help but feel like he is drowning in information that seem to come easily to everyone but him.

He learns not to ask questions when he is not ready for answers.

\---

The snow falls two weeks later, thick flakes that come late at night and turn the world outside the bedroom window into something enthralling and surreal.

Steve is sprawled half over her, his head on Diana’s chest and her arms wrapped around him, his breathing yet to be found. He can feel her fingers thread through his hair, damp with sweat, her heart hammering away in earnest into his ear.

He tries to shift his weight off of her. “I’m heavy,” he slurs, utterly spent, but Diana tightens her hold on him.

“I like it,” she whispers into his hairline and he doesn’t have it in him to protest. Not when there is a smile in her voice and he is too boneless to move.

He likes feeling every inch of her body with every inch of his. Can’t get enough of her.

There is still an edge of desperation to her touch sometimes – like she can’t hold him close enough, like she is scared that he might slip right through her fingers. Steve is not afraid of losing her, not really. Not the same way she had lost him for a hundred years. But he is, too, because she is the best thing that has ever happened to him and he doesn’t trust it to last. Doesn’t trust whatever powers-that-be that spin the wheel of fortune high above them and dictate their fates not to screw him over. It has happened before, after all, and he wouldn’t be surprised.

However, that is not to say that he doesn’t trust Diana. He trusts her more than anyone in all of creation and part of him knows that he should be wary of it, but he is not. She sees right through him when even he wants to look away. She takes him apart and puts him back together without losing even the small parts in the process, and somehow in the end he is a better version of himself than he was before. She calls him out on his bullshit but so does he, without hesitation, and sometimes it feels like a balance.

Other times, it makes him want to laugh.

They will both have to figure this out one way or another eventually, but he is not in a hurry. Truth is, he wouldn’t have minded spending forever doing just that.  

“Like Veld,” Diana says quietly when he starts to doze off, snapping him back into wakefulness.

Steve focuses on the snow storm. He feels her sigh against him and holds her closer still.

“Do you remember Veld?” He asks. Can’t help but ask. Can’t help but ask so many things.

The memory is strikingly bright in his mind, every word, every touch seared into his brain for the rest of eternity. But, technically, it has only been three weeks for him. It has been a century for Diana. He wouldn’t have faulted _her_ memory for getting blurry.

He feels her hand move through his hair once more. “I do.”

“What do you remember?” Steve traces a pattern over her shoulder with his fingers as the whiteness outside grows nearly absolute.

“Charlie singing,” Diana whispers, smiling.

“Somewhat off-key,” Steve adds with a chuckle, a low sound rumbling in his chest.

She laughs a little and he feels the curve of her lips when she brushes a kiss to his forehead. “Us dancing,” she continues.

“Swaying,” he corrects her like she did back then.

“Swaying,” she echoes, amused. “The room above the inn…”

This time, when Steve pulls back and props himself up on his elbow, Diana doesn’t stop him. His gaze trail over her face. He brushes her hair from her cheek, so drunk on her he can’t think straight.

“Yeah?” He smiles.

She grins back at him, and then laughs, her eyes crinkling, and the sound of it makes his heartbeat stutter and trip in his chest.

Talking about the past makes him realize how fleeting the present could be, and how uncertain the future is, no matter how carefully they plan it. There are reasons why this can’t work out, and reasons why it will. He decides that Diana’s smile belongs with the latter category.

Steve wants to live forever because he wants to never forget. Not anything, not a single thing. For other reasons, too, but mostly this, he thinks. Until she kisses him, and he forgets _how_ to think for a long while.

\---

Diana doesn’t have a Christmas tree. Doesn’t have a box of mismatched ornaments, either. Never has. All those years in his world, and parts of it are still as alien to her as they were when she first arrived there.  

It comes up during dinner one night and is said in passing, without a hint of wistfulness – it never felt like her place, like her tradition to adhere to or her celebration to enjoy – before she moves on to telling him about her day.

Steve stares at her for a long moment, not quite sure how to feel about it, or what to say. It’s not a big deal, he knows that. In the grand scheme of things, it’s nothing at all. But maybe he could—

Maybe he could--

And just like that, Steve Trevor is a man on a mission again.

The last Christmas he can remember is the one from when he was 9, and his chest constricts with a rueful twitch even though the memory is blurred and frayed and out of focus. He hasn’t thought of that winter in so long that he can barely pull the images from the back of his mind – the candle-lit table and modest but delicious meal, the smell of food rich in his mind, and them sitting together at the table by the fireplace as the storm raged behind snow-frosted windows.

On impulse, he tries to conjure the sound of his mother’s voice but it fades off into nothing. Not even a hint of it left behind.

He wonders where those memories went and what took their place, and what happened before or after that made the magic fade. The war, he thinks. So much of it that for the longest time he didn’t know how anything else would ever fit. Good things, too. Friends and shared moments of connection; belly laughs when good spirit was all they had.

Disappointment cuts through him and he shakes his head, forcing himself to stay focused.

Steve hasn’t thought of Christmas in forever and a half. The war never took a break for celebrations, and besides, when each day they woke up and got to see the sun felt like a miracle, if seemed foolish to consider a holiday something special. Sometimes, he feels like the war has lasted for decades. Like it has never ended.

It is not about Christmas though, he decides in the end. Not really. Not in the general sense of things.

He knows he doesn’t need to earn Diana’s love any more than she needs to earn his – and god help him, she never did. He has loved her since the moment he met her. Maybe since before then even – he can no longer remember not feeling the burning tightness of it in his chest, the force of it thrumming in his veins. But it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t want to give her everything, and while laying the world at her feet and fetching each star from the sky might not necessarily be a practical plan, maybe he can start somewhere else.

Somewhere smaller, for now.

Steve has Diana’s credit card. He has only used it on groceries before, and – once – to buy her flowers. And even though she has told him many times that he can, he _should_ , do whatever he wants with it, he has never taken her up on her offer before.

It is burning a hole in his pocket when he steps into the department store and reminds himself to breathe. The place is loud. It’s packed and full of colour and it sets him on edge (because apparently you can take a man out of the war but you can’t take the war out of a man). It makes him want to turn around and retreat to safety, wherever that might be.

Yet, there is no gunfire outside and no planes in the sky dropping bombs on the city. When hi heartbeat settles, he realizes that it is excitement that surrounds him, and so he squares his shoulders and marches on, wishing he’d made a list and worried that he will forget something.

“Is there something in particular you’re looking for?” A sales assistant whose name tag reads Jen asks Steve when she finds him gaping at the shelves and trying to wrap his mind around the choices that he doesn’t know how to make.

He blinks at her. “Huh?”

Is there?

The list would have been handy right now.

He thinks of Diana and the things that she likes – books with deep meaning but also comic strips in the morning paper and strong tea on cold nights, she likes breakfast food and wearing his shirts and having her hair down, and she really likes that thing that he does with his tongue—

Not helping.

Not helping _at all_.

Steve clears his throat, feeling the back of his neck grow hot.

Maybe he does need some help, just this once, because he has never felt this out of time in his life, and there is a very good chance that it will take him another hundred years to get used to the world that is no longer his, but he doesn’t have a hundred years. He only has two days.

\---

He would have been surprised if everything went as smoothly as he planned so of course it doesn’t.

Steve is a decent enough cook as long as basic survival is concerned – he can assemble a mean sandwich, pour milk into cereal without spilling it, and no one makes those instant noodles like he does, hands down. However, cooking a _meal_ is not the same thing, and even though he is fairly certain that is it not a complete disaster _– hey, at least the kitchen is not on fire!_ – he is sceptical about the overall result.

He is debating the dilemma of lumps in mashed potatoes and whether or not it’s worth giving that mixer thing another try when Diana comes home earlier than he expected, pink-cheeked and with the snow melting on her wool coat.

He hasn’t noticed that it started again.

She is early and he hasn’t cleaned the cooking counter yet and the roast is going to need another half hour in the oven, provided he figured out how to use the damn thing correctly, and even though he knows that none of this has to be perfect – because nothing and no one is, except maybe for Diana herself but she would never agree with him if Steve told her that – he still wishes that he had more time.

For a long moment, Diana stands frozen in the doorway, her hand on the knob, her eyes moving over the Christmas tree that takes up the whole corner, adorned with bright ornaments that don’t look quite like those that Steve’s mother kept in the box that always made him think of pirates and hidden treasures, but they are shiny and pretty and, dammit, he tried his best. She takes in fairy lights strung around the room and two rather tacky-looking socks hanging over the fireplace and more ornaments that he attempted to be creative with.

(There is a present for her in one of the stockings, too. The best idea he could come up with on such a short notice that he didn’t have to pay for with her own money. It’s a braided leather bracelet that Chief made for him a while ago. He called it a good luck charm, and while Steve didn’t believe in luck, never had, he carried it with him. Perhaps because he has always believed in friendship and gratitude above all else.  

He found it in the pocket of his pants the morning after Barry brought him back, the only thing he still had from his own time, aside from his father’s watch.

There is not much else he can give her, except for his heart maybe, but she already has it so a bracelet will have to do.)

“Steve,” Diana breathes, turning to him, and he is suddenly very aware of her apron that he is wearing and the flour on his hands and how half the kitchen is a mess while the other half is only a step above it.

“I thought you had a meeting,” he blurts out the first thing that comes to his mind, and grimaces when it comes out like he doesn’t want her there. Because he does. He always does.  

She smiles. “I cancelled it. It’s the last day before the holidays, I sent everyone home early.”

He nods and glances around in panic, his mind racing. He turns back to her and clears his throat.

“It was meant to be a surprise,” he confesses.

Diana presses her lips around a smile. “So I see.”

“You weren’t supposed to be here yet,” he adds.

“I figured.”

She steps into the apartment and closes the door, pausing for a second to notice a wreath framing the peephole. (Steve still can remember how they used to make those themselves but now one could buy a hundred wreaths of any shape and colour like it’s nothing, and for some reason, it is mildly disorienting.)

He fumbles with the apron belt until he can yank it off and tries to smooth down his hair—and great, now there is flour in his hair, too. Smooth, Trevor. Very smooth. This is not how it was supposed to happen, he thinks. He had it planned out, and…

And he doesn’t care about any of that, not one bit, because Diana crosses the hallway and walks over to him. She shrugs off her coat and drapes it over the back of the chair – and he catches the fresh scent of winter clinging to her clothes - before dipping her finger into a bowl of sauce he has been working on when she walked in.

“This is good,” she tells him after licking it clean.

Steve gapes at her, his jaw slack. She bites her lip, trying not to laugh, and it is suddenly more than he can handle. He reaches for her, his fingers curling around her hips to pull her closer until there is no space and no air left between them, and then he kisses her like it’s been months and not mere hours since the last time he did just that.

Diana kisses him back, her hands winding into his hair.

“You didn’t have to do so this, Steve,” she murmurs against his lips when he pulls back.

He rests his forehead against hers and traces his thumb along her cheekbone. “I wanted to.”

She smiles at him. “It smells wonderful.”

Steve makes a face. “Don’t say that until you’ve actually tried it,” he warns, his voice self-deprecating. “That… um, Google _thing_ wasn’t very helpful, if I’m being honest.”

He feels her nails scratch through his hair at the nape of his neck. “You’re a marvel,” Diana whispers, shaking her head a little, and kisses him again.

\---

They eat, and even though there could be fewer lumps in mashed potatoes and the roast could have used some more seasoning, it is not half as bad. So much so that Steve can’t help but feel all puffed-chest proud because everyone starts somewhere, and having a room to grow is not something to be ashamed of.

He can take a rifle apart and put it back together in his sleep, he survived the war – or _almost_ did, at least; he is yet to figure out how to factor Barry’s assistance into the narrative – but up until a few hours ago he was someone who Charlie once labelled as “a man who can’t fry an egg to save his life”. The roast feels like an accomplishment. (So what if the apple pie is store-bought?)

Intrigued, Diana offers to help, but he waves her off, determined to finish what he has started. It’s the least he can do.

They eat with the music playing in the background, and Steve watches her in the candlelight with fairy lights twinkling above them, a small smile on her face. And he thinks that he would travel across a thousand years to fall in love with her all over again if he had to. If he could.

When he pulls out the bracelet, recognition sparks in Diana’s eyes. Recognition and understanding when she touches soft, worn leather, old memories flaring up in her mind. He watches them chase across her expression, her features softening.

“Steve.” She looks up at him, her thumb tracing the curves of the delicate braid.

She hasn’t known his friends like Steve knew them, but so can be said about him, too. All those years that she spent with them after the war…

He is suddenly very aware of the thread connecting them – with each other and with the past. Something that runs deeper than anything he has ever felt. Something that, he suspects, will still be there long after they are both gone.

“I know it’s not much…” Steve starts and trails off.

Truth be told, he knows nothing about current trends and fashions, or what one could give to a woman who seems to already have everything, and that’s the problem – there is so much that he wants to give her, but he is only a man. The only who loves her desperately and unapologetically, hoping and praying that it’s enough.

Diana is shaking her head. “It’s beautiful,” she assured him earnestly. “It’s--”

“From Chief, yeah,” he nods.

“I don’t have anything for you,” she says as he affixes it around her wrist.

She touches his cheek with her other hand, and when he raises his eyes, he finds her watching him, her expression odd in the way he can’t read. There are still moments like this sometimes, when she looks at him like she can see into his soul, and he wonders if she can find there something that she might not like.

He has never wanted to share more of himself with anyone than he does with her. He has never been more scared to do so, too.

“I have you,” he says simply, moving closer and reaching up to tuck a piece of her hair behind her ear as he tries to bottle up the contentment that he feels around her so he can remember it for as long as he breathes. Knowing what Diana is and what she is capable of doesn’t make it easy for him to believe in magic, not entirely, but this moment - with the fire crackling in the grate and the smell of pine and cinnamon heavy in the air and the snow falling outside - is as magical as it can be. “What else can I ask for?”

“Flatterer,” she says, breaking into a smile so bright that it unravels the tight knot in his chest and he laughs before dipping his head to press his mouth to hers. She tastes of sugar and wine as she kisses him back, her hands on either side of his face.

He could do this forever, Steve thinks. Every day for a thousand lifetimes.

\---

“Why would you do it?” Diana asked Barry the morning she and Steve left Gotham, their bags piled in the corner and Bruce yelling from the Batcave that the weather was about to turn for the worse and they should get going.

Barry stuffed his hands deep into the pockets of his pants and looked down at his socked toes. Mismatched, Diana noted as she watched the tips of his ears turn red.

“I saw the photo,” he told her, grimacing a little, and her heartbeat stuttered in her chest.

She never knew he could do that, run faster than time itself, and even if she did, she would never have asked him to do this. Not for her, not for anyone else, not any more than she would have used her own powers for personal gain. And here he was, standing before her and looking like he was about to get chastised for giving her the greatest gift Diana could ever imagine.

Affection pooled in her chest, her throat tight with emotion.

“Barry…”

“And the watch,” he added quickly, looking up to meet her eyes. “That time, in the Batcave, you had that watch… which I assumed was his because it was all old and ugly—sorry,” he catches himself, “and I just--” he ran his hand over his hair, shrugging a little.

As if it explained everything.

As if it explained anything at all.

She smiled and moved toward him, wrapping her arms tightly around him, his body stiff for a moment because apparently the gesture came as a surprise. “Thank you,” she whispered into Barry’s ear as a bout of Steve’s laughter carried from the lounge. “Thank you for bringing him back to me.”

The memory feels weirdly old now.

It is impossible to believe that it has only been several weeks since he ran all the way back to 1918 to pull Steve out of the plane seconds before it went up in flames. Since Steve smiled at her from across Bruce’s living room and made a hundred years that had passed since that fateful night a century ago fall away, her time without him feeling like nothing but a faint dream.

There are still moments when she can feel his absence like a gnawing tug in the pit of her stomach, a chill running through her system when she least expects it. There are times when she wakes up in the dead of the night certain that it has all been an illusion. But the pain is not as sharp. It no longer takes Diana’s breath away or leaves her gasping for air, and all she has to do is roll over and reach for him to get all the reassurance that she needs that he is really and truly back.  

The process is slow, but she is healing.

On Christmas morning, the world outside is quiet and white. Steve is in the kitchen, making hot cocoa for them – like they used to do in his family. With marshmallows – because he knows that she likes it that way. He is humming under his breath, and Diana smiles despite herself watching him from the doorway, her hands itching to smooth down his rather epic bedhead, his hair sticking out in every which way.

Last night, they did a puzzle, a thousand pieces strewn over the coffee table, and talked late into the night. They drank wine and danced to the melodic ballads about finding love and the miracles that happen on snowy nights. And then he took her to bed and made her forget what it felt like to be without him. Until her world was nothing but him.

Diana runs her index finger absently over the bracelet still wrapped around her wrist. She feels magic thrumming through it, ancient magic that has existed since before her time and will still do when there is no trace of her left in this world. And she wonders if Chief knew. If he knew to keep Steve safe until his time came to return to her. And she says a silent thank you to whatever gods that made it happen, to the stars that needed to align just the right way.

Steve turns around, two mugs filled to the brim in his hands with marshmallows bobbing on the surface. When he spots her, he smiles, and her very soul unfurls in her chest, taking up the space carved out by loneliness and heartache.

He puts the mugs down and walks over to her, his arms sliding around her waist. His grin is cheeky when he glances up, and Diana has a split second to follow his gaze and notice a sprig of mistletoe above their heads before his mouth captures hers.

When he kisses her, she feels safe. Like being lost and finding her way back to where she belongs.

“Merry Christmas,” Steve whispers when he leans back, and she can’t help but smile, her heart so full it might burst.

“How many of those did you put around the house, Steve?” She asks because it’s not the first mistletoe she’s come upon and she doubts that it’s the last one, either.

Not that she minds it, all things considered.

“Hey, it’s a tradition,” he protests without answering her question. “It’s what people do…” _when they have no wars to fight._ He trails off, and she feels like she is drowning and soaring all at once.

Man’s world finally feels like home.  

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you guys are all having a wonderful holiday season with your families and loved ones, and Happy New Year to you all!
> 
> Comments and feedback are always much appreciated :)


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